I looked around the city and saw that smoke and flames were everywhere. My father yelled at us to follow him down the street with a huge crowd of people all moving in the direction of Golden Gate Park. (Within two days, my father had secured a tent for us in Golden Gate Park with thousands of other survivors / refugees.) the smoke, the cinders, the people crying as we all watched out city go up in flames -- it was terrifying. I will never forget the fear and agony on the faces of the people as we walked together to get away from the fires that were blazing all around us.

We realized we were all going to be refugees, but my mother kept saying, "We have our lives, we are alive, and so we are the lucky ones!" I didn't feel very lucky, as my school burned to the ground and several of my classmates (we were about to graduate from high school) were crushed in the falling buildings. An aunt was killed in the fire and two cousins were killed by falling buildings. I guess I was lucky.

The fire trucks were very slow to get to the burning buildings, partly because so many people had crowded...

But there was futility in the fire trucks' efforts because the water mains had all been broken by the violent shaking so when fire trucks tried to put out a building fire, there was no water available. This was one of the most frustrating aspects of the earthquake; watching frustrated firefighters as they watched building after building burn to the ground. To watch as the city burned.
I was so frightened and panicked right after the quake that I didn't cry. But later, in Golden Gate Park, as I lay on a blanket in the grass -- that my mom had taken from our apartment before the building burned -- I began to cry. I bawled my eyes out for several hours while cinders fell, smoke completely clouded the sky, and people kept pouring into the park for their safety. Some were fully dressed, others were still in night clothes, but all of us knew our city was ruined and we would have to start all over, which we managed to do, thank God, we certainly did rebuild our city.